


and it's peaceful in the deep

by theviolonist



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Jaegers, Sentient Jaegers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-07
Updated: 2013-10-07
Packaged: 2017-12-28 16:11:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/993919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Machines have hearts, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and it's peaceful in the deep

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: ["Хорошо меж подводных стеблей"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2561066) by [Alre_Snow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alre_Snow/pseuds/Alre_Snow)



They drift awake slowly, coming into the world in an entirely different fashion from their makers: first the extremities, knuckles, knees; then the broad limbs of metal, where power is already building, even without electricity; then all the rest, the head, the reactors, the canons and swords and chainsaws and the hundred other weapons they designed not for them to hold but to contain, to absorb and to hold like auxiliary limbs; and finally the heart.

That's when it starts. The heart --

_boom boom_

the heart -- which beats and radiates and will in the future have a thousand symptoms to indicate just how alive it is, despite its plethora of names and symbols and banners -- the heart. But this, more importantly, this fact that the scientists consistently overlook or maybe ignore, because they're afraid, because, well, they've had their share of monsters and they know what happens with slaves, history repeats itself and all that [and besides, how exactly would they deal with a three-hundred feet sentient robot, how], this question, this:

what creature with a heart isn't afraid to die? 

 

The Mark Is have barely risen from their slumber that they're slaughtered, nearly all of them. A wave of monsters, all connected through a hivemind - or so they will say, later, forgoing the addendum: not so different - takes the fleet of them apart: quickly, violently, without mercy, pity or even concern. Like they tear through buildings they tear through the metal sheeting, and because jaegers are human creations they do not cry, they do not scream, they crumble on themselves and it is the pilots who bear the brunt of their agony, the overwhelming sadness of a beast who falls face-first in the ocean. Jaegers, with their pilots. If one of them had crawled out of the rubble afterwards, or had swam to the surface despite the wounds and the torn skull, they would have said, awed and nearly incomprehensible - _they're alive_. 

Of course they're alive. Who isn't alive these days, in this era of monsters and giants? Who isn't alive? Maybe it's the little people, maybe it's them who are losing their breath, losing the battles, losing the war. Maybe they should just stop fighting, hide behind one of their shatterdomes and let the grown-ups handle it.

All the pilots have felt it, that exhilaration: the first time you step into the jaeger that you've been given, that you've chosen - the jaeger that has chosen you - and you fold your fingers into a fist and _there it is_ , and you wonder, like you're back to being three years old in front of the mirror and wondering why that person on the other side who looks so admirably like you is doing the exact same things, only in reverse -- you wonder if it would continue to move even without you, if it dances at night, tons-heavy feet marking a singular beat. 

 

Jaegers do not have memories. If they did—

_sound. fire. "this is the start of a revolution, marshall. we can win the war with this. i'm sure we can.""yes, well, let's win the war first, and be sure after." more fire. the heart is coming. boom boom. the drift. memories. gravel. metal. nuclear fusion canons armor interface the drift the Drift the DRIFT. pilots. friends. fire. water. enemies (monsters). "the first time you step into a jaeger—""don't fall down the rabbit hole, mako." guns blazing. fire. fish. more fish. sharks. cities. snow. mirrors. names. yukon tango ronin prophet eden brutus hyperion echo jaeger jaeger jaeger. hunter. "today we are-" fire. silence. "you'll always find me in the drift." silence. silence._

But the jaegers don't have memories. The scientists will tell you that and, more probing, the pilots, those who have been in those jaegers time and time again, who have travelled in each other's brains and come out relatively unscathed, because no one, no one comes out of a war unscathed, will tell you. Listen to Mako Mori, when the reporters question her, after, in the hangar, and she leans into her co-pilot without even noticing it (they do that these days, because jaegers bring people together, weave minds and hearts and memories and make single complex beings to their semblance, only smaller and remarkably simpler) —"No. The jaegers don't have memories." She even smiles a little. Not for the reporters, of course. 

But she knows. She knows, and Raleigh Becket knows, and everyone who has lived and died in those jaegers knows that in the Drift there are things that don't belong to you and that don't belong to your co-pilot and that don't belong to anyone, might belong to the universe and might belong to that giant hunk of metal they are trying to steer. Jaegers don't have memories. Of course jaegers have memories. Stone has memories. Why not metal? 

Still, the same answers. It's a precaution. And in a way they —Striker, Gipsy, and all the others, dead or alive— are grateful. That way they can hold onto those memories: they keep them, hoard them, polish them until they're engraved in the iron, in the tiny locks of their heart. Their aim is true, guided by the memory of fire. 

 

Before anyone knew that they were going to win the war, they were going to lose the war. That's how war works: they tell you you've got to believe it, you've got to already have won in your mind, in the end, don't get cocky of course but know, _know_ we are going to win. They tell you you've got to believe it but you don't. You don't believe it. Until you win a war you've lost it, it's as simple as that, as elementary, as basic. 

So the war is lost. The war is lost before the Jaeger Program: they're just one more useless defense against the monsters, one more brick wall the gigantic teeth with tear through like paper. And so the jaegers wake up afraid. What did you expect? The men who made them were afraid; they were men who came home every night wondering if a giant shark was going to gobble up their home and their children the next morning, and they were men who didn't dare believe that a life-size Transformer was going to win them this endless, apocalyptic war. Why would they?

jae.ger. hunter. If only it were that easy, right? The jaegers - not hunters now: saviors, knights in shining armor, America's very own Iron Man - are paraded in the streets, made into toys, shown on TV. People ooh and aah from all sides, throw flowers and cheer, cheer endlessly until that cheer is a dull roar that rises and reverberates inside the iron skull. Back to the water. Away from the cameras, who don't dare to come too close, they take steps that make the silent earth at the bottom of the ocean tremble. Face to face with the monster. The pilots hold their breaths, their heartbeats quick and shallow like rabbits'. [what creature with a heart isn't afraid to die?] One punch. In the Drift things explode too, the light is bright, there is fire. The formations and combat techniques have names but out there everything seems random, seems to be hanging by a thread and answer only to chance. Sometimes, the pilots will say if they're drunk enough, sometimes it feels like the jaeger is the one guiding you and you're only following, sometimes it feels like the machine is a puppeteer, a master. Some of them are afraid of that, others less. When they're sober they don't talk about it. Did I say that? No, it was nothing. Crap. Drunken jabber.

And the others— well, the others choose to believe them.

 

Death doesn't come easy, or cheap. In this war economy everything has a price, and death is only granted to the most deserving, capable, and faithful. It sets in one punch at a time, with sounds of crunched iron, with blue acid and the indescribable pain that comes with being torn apart, piece by piece. The Drift becomes a world of pain: the memories are tainted, minds are broken, distorted, torn (look at that man and his brother); the jaegers fight until the last heartbeat and death never does cradle them, only takes them like a revenge, stealing them from the claws of the kaijus.

In this century death is not solitary. Their heart can host three minds, four [ten, a hundred, millions] and they were born a brotherhood. There is never enough time to cry all the goodbyes, even with the human names. Brawler Coyote Horizon Romeo Ta—

 

Brothers. In the Drift everyone and everything is family. Lovers, parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends: it doesn't matter, family in the Drift is the same word as universe, and universe is the same word as god. In the Drift the jaegers look inwards and see brothers and sisters and forget the human names in favor of gestures, reaching forward, walking, heart pumping louder and louder. The human names are good for humans, but jaegers aren't human: jaegers are machines, machines with hearts, one step under god. One of the humans says that mathematics is as close as they can get to the handwriting of God - their god, a puny indifferent little god, unworthy of notice - and it makes them smile, if they could smile— because they know where to find the _real_ handwriting of god, and it's right there in the Drift, in the middle of the swirling connection, tangled between the waves, the weaved threads of sound and memory and love and joy and failure.

Crimson Typhoon steps into the ocean and falls. Cheno Alpha follows and falls, too. When the dome is silent and dark - relatively silent and relatively dark -, the jaegers cry. They howl their fear that the monsters will win, their grief for their brothers who have fallen, so many of them, so many soldiers who were built only to fight and have only fought. They cry for the loneliness of those that remain, for their pilots, for the weariness and the fire and the sea. When they see the monsters they say— 

_go home go home go home_

but the monsters are blind or maybe pitiless, and they refuse. Stubbornly they open their jaws, which are now all too familiar, dripping with kaiju blue that can tear through the jaegers' metal skin and reach into their entrails. Kill or be killed, the humans say.

_boom boom_

Kill.

[jae.ger. hunter. Sometimes it's as simple as that, and they hunt.]

 

No one who has been in a war can call the final death - whether it's the enemy's or yours - failure or victory. Those are words for the crowds, for the scared citizens that are finally free to open their shutters and run in the streets without fear. For the soldiers there remain others: emptiness. Exhaustion. Weariness. They collect their scars and their survivors and the shatterdome is not a shatterdome anymore because it is empty of jaegers. Mako Mori and Raleigh Becket, who both, at different times of their lives before they came to know each other, called Gipsy Danger 'she', have left her at the bottom of the ocean, trapped in a hostile new universe. Maybe she's screaming, but they can't hear, too preoccupied by their own remaining drift, the imprint of a neural handshake that won't leave, that they don't want to leave, even though they won't say that anywhere but in the privacy of their shared mind. 

But you see, you see— [what creature with a heart isn't afraid to die?] fear is not the end of things, fear is only the beginning, and just because the jaegers are dismantled doesn't mean they're not alive. In the celebrations they're an elephant cemetery and their wayward bones are hoarse from screaming into deaf ears and dumb bodies: _i. am. alive._ because now that the monsters have ebbed there is a slot open for a new kind of monsters, and, well— 

If they were articulate enough they would say, how can you not know, aren't there enough movies with sentient robots that you really don't realize that metal isn't just metal, that bad things happen when you put a nuclear heart inside a machine. But now they're exhausted, the day has ended, the war has been won. They're not only soldiers but they're soldiers too, not human (not. human) and they don't feel jealousy or bitterness or resentment, only the heavy sorrow of sentient beasts.

 

Do you think about the parcels that lay at the bottom of the ocean? They would only be a treasure for a handful of people, for humans who will soon be dead but who will, before they die, tell their children one night as a bedtime story: "Imagine a machine. A machine with a heart," and smile, because they know.


End file.
